Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  This failure left the under-merchant in a difficult position. It would, of course, have been easy enough for Jeronimus to have finished the helpless infant off, but for some reason he retained his old aversion to killing with his bare hands. He chose, instead, to blood another of the minor mutineers who had thus far evaded his responsibilities.

  Cornelisz’s chosen instrument on this occasion was another of the island’s weaklings: Pelsaert’s trusted clerk, Salomon Deschamps of Amsterdam. Deschamps, who was the most senior VOC officer in the Abrolhos after Jeronimus himself, was a coward who had done nothing to prevent the under-merchant from seizing control of the islands, “permitting the evil to take its course without saying anything against it, shutting his eyes and dissimulating in order to prolong his own life.” Indeed, as soon as Cornelisz had seemed securely established, he had transferred his allegiance to the mutineers. Now the clerk was made to pay for this betrayal.

  “On 20 July, at night, he was fetched out of his tent by Jacop Pietersz, who took him into Mayken Cardoes’ tent, where David Zevanck, Jan Hendricxsz and Cornelis Pietersz of Utrecht were, who said to him that they were not certain of his faithfulness [and] therefore took a Young Suckling child from the lap of the foresaid mother, Mayken Cardoes, and said to him, ‘Deschamps, here is a Half dead child. You are not a fighting Man, here is a little noose, go over there and fix it so that we here on the Island do not hear so much wailing.’ Then he, Deschamps, without protest, has taken the child outside the tent and has strangled it, an act of very evil Consequence.”

  Mayken Cardoes’s baby was the first of the Batavia survivors that Cornelisz attempted to murder himself, and it would also be the last. Yet by the time Deschamps had squeezed its barely begun life from it, the infant had become the 105th person to die at the under-merchant’s hands. By now fewer than 60 people were still alive on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus was close to doing what he had set out to do: “to have murdered or destroyed all the people until the amount of 45 or less.”

  Of all the families on the island, by far the largest was the predikant’s. Gijsbert Bastiaensz and Maria Schepens had been blessed with a total of eight children, seven of whom had sailed with them on the Batavia. In an age in which half of all the children born in Europe died before reaching adulthood, Bastiaensz had been exceptionally fortunate to lose only one child in infancy. Even more remarkably, the predikant’s wife, his servant girl, Wybrecht Claasen, and all seven of the children had survived the many rigors of the voyage: running aground on the Walcheren Banks, the long journey to the Abrolhos, the shipwreck, five waterless and agonizing days on Batavia’s Graveyard, the maid’s struggle to fetch water from the hulk, and finally 20 days of terror at the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz.

  Bastiaensz enjoyed a certain status, it was true—one that had guaranteed him and his family good rations on the ship, and some protection on the island, too—but under the circumstances, the fact that he still had all his family around him must have seemed perfectly miraculous to the rest of the Batavia survivors: proof, if any were required, that the predikant truly was a man of God.

  Of the minister’s children, four were boys. The eldest, who had been given his grandfather’s name, was called Bastiaen Gijsbertsz; he was 23 years old, and since he was sufficiently well educated and mature to do useful work, he had been given the rank of VOC assistant and spent the voyage helping Pelsaert with his clerical work. His brother Pieter Gijsbertsz was four years younger, but though certainly old enough to join Jan Company he had not done so; it is possible that—since Bastiaen was evidently unsuited to life as a predikant—Gijsbert’s second son was destined for the clergy. The other boys were still of school age: Johannes was 13 and Roelant, the youngest child of all, was only 8.

  The minister’s daughters were Judick, Willemijntgie, and Agnete. Judick was the second child; she was 21 and thus of marriageable age. In so large a family she must have spent a good deal of her time helping her mother with the younger children, although Willemijntgie, at 14, was also nearly grown-up. The youngest girl, Agnete, had celebrated her 11th birthday shortly before they had reached the Cape.

  On an island where women were outnumbered 9 or 10 to 1 by men, Judick could not help but attract attention, the more so because there were no more than three unmarried women on Batavia’s Graveyard. Soon she was being courted by Coenraat van Huyssen, the young cadet who was by now the murderer of half a dozen people. Being good-looking and a minor member of the nobility, as well as a leading member of Cornelisz’s blood council, Van Huyssen had some claim to be the most eligible of the island’s many bachelors, and unwelcome though his attentions were in most respects, they at least saved the girl from being molested by the other mutineers. She did not discourage him. Matters moved swiftly, and within a month of their arrival in the Abrolhos Van Huyssen was proposing matrimony—but with an ugly caveat. Since the couple could not legally be married in the islands (the consent of the groom’s parents, at home in the Dutch Republic, would be required to make the match binding), Coenraat agreed to be content with a mere engagement—so long, that is, as Judick consummate their betrothal on the spot.

  The preacher and his daughter now found themselves in an impossible position. “Coenraat van Huyssen from Gelderlandt,” scribbled Bastiaensz,

  “a member of the Council of those Murderers, besought my Daughter in Holy Wedlock. But said he would make a Betrothal with her and marry her legally before all the World, [and] that he would do at the first opportunity; many words were said about this matter, too long to narrate, for Judick and I deliberated thus: that it was better to be kept legally by one Man, in such a time, than to be mis-used. Therefore he made a betrothal vow with her, and all that went with that.

  “I begged that she should go and live with him the next day . . . but the other Murderers, coming in front of the Tent, said that it had to happen that night and immediately, otherwise they were ready to kill us . . . . She has been with him in that respect, but she has not been abused, as she has told me. What could one do against it?”

  As her father had predicted, Judick’s relationship with Van Huyssen was enough to safeguard her from harm, but even if the mutineer’s feelings for the girl were genuine, she had no power to protect the other members of her family. For two weeks now Cornelisz had eased his boredom and sated his men’s increasing blood lust every second or third day. The general pattern was one of increasing violence. Drownings had given way to stabbings and cut throats, and the sheer scale of the murders had increased, too—from the 15 people killed on 9 July to the 23 dispatched on Seals’ Island nine days later. In the three days since the latter massacre, however, the one incident of note had been the under-merchant’s poisoning of Mayken Cardoes’s child. This was not enough for some of the mutineers. The daily routine of catching, preparing, and eating food held limited appeal for men who had come to enjoy the power of taking life, and by the end of the third week of the month Zevanck and the others were anxious to kill again. The largest (indeed the only real) target left to them was the family of Gijsbert Bastiaensz.

  Judick was now inviolate, and Cornelisz had decided the predikant himself might also be worth sparing; though their theologies could not have been more different, Jeronimus could still see uses for a man of God. Maria Schepens and her six remaining children were a different matter. On the evening of 21 July, Bastiaensz and his eldest daughter were lured away from their quarters by an invitation to dine with Van Huyssen and Cornelisz in the jonker’s quarters. While they were being entertained with a meal of cask meat and red wine salvaged from the wreck, David Zevanck and Jacop Pietersz gathered seven of the principal mutineers. Together, they made their way to the minister’s tent. It would be “a pleasant outing,” the Stone-Cutter declared, to “put the predikant’s folk out of the way.”

  By now they were well-practiced killers, and the murders had been carefully planned. Earlier in the evening a group of Cornelisz’s men had dug a grave pit, large enough to hold eight bod
ies, not far from the tents. Zevanck and Pietersz had also decided to kill the family in their tent, where there would be less chance of any of the children contriving to escape. To this end the men exchanged their swords for knives and hatchets, which were better tools for killing at close quarters.

  Pietersz and Andries Jonas were the last to arrive in the survivors’ camp. They found Zevanck and Jan Hendricxsz waiting; with them were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Cornelis Pietersz, Andries Liebent, and a Dutch soldier called Wouter Loos. Inside the tent, the preacher’s family was cooking dinner. A kettle full of sea lion’s meat hung boiling over the fire.

  The first men to approach were Zevanck and Hendricxsz, the most brutal of the mutineers. Zevanck crept to the entrance of the tent and called for Wybrecht Claasen. In a second or two the servant girl emerged, walking almost straight onto Hendricxsz’s dagger. The German soldier stabbed her once and left her dying on the shingle. Meanwhile Zevanck forced his way into the tent with the main body of the mutineers. It was so crowded that Pietersz and Jonas, the late arrivals, had to wait outside.

  Maria Schepens and her children must have known they were dead the moment they saw the axe in David Zevanck’s hand, but once again the young assistant felt the need to justify his actions. There was an oil lamp hanging in the tent; he took it, lifted it above his head and called out, “Here has been reported hidden goods of the Company that we will search for.” He paused, then added ominously: “And we will get them.” At this, the other mutineers began to hunt through the few possessions in the tent until, after a moment or two, the lamp blew out—Zevanck no doubt extinguished it himself—and in the pitch-black crush the murdering began.

  There were 14 people in the tent: 7 of Jeronimus’s men and 7 members of the preacher’s family, one victim to each man. The mutineers laid about themselves with hatchets. Lenert van Os caved in Maria’s skull with several blows, while Mattys Beer bludgeoned Willemijntgie. Wouter Loos pushed Bastiaen to the ground “and has beaten the eldest son underfoot with an adze, until he was dead,” while Zevanck, Van Os, and Beer between them accounted for Pieter, Johannes, and Agnete. The only child not killed or wounded in the initial flurry of blows was the youngest; eight-year-old Roelant was so small that he ducked through the legs of his attacker, Beer, and fled in terror, searching desperately for a way out of the tent. He almost got away; Beer dared not turn and swing at the boy for fear of striking one of his companions. But Zevanck and Cornelis Pietersz were standing close behind him, and one or other of them brought his hatchet down hard upon the child and killed him.

  In only a few moments the killing ceased. Then the murderers became aware that one of their victims was still alive, and moaning in pain. It was Maria Schepens, “who was not then quite dead.” Mattys Beer bent over her as she lay prostrate on the ground and finished her off with several more blows to the head. The groans stopped. It was over.

  They cleared the tent. Andries Liebent made off with the meat from the dead family’s kettle and took it back to his own quarters. The other murderers dragged the bodies to the pit that had been prepared and hurled them in, so that they lay huddled together in a single bloodstained mass.

  It was still only midevening and the mutineers’ blood was up. The group split up and went in search of other prey. Jan Hendricxsz went to the tent of Hendrick Denys, one of the Company bookkeepers, ordered him out onto the shingle, and, when he showed himself, “battered in [his] head, with an adze, in front of his tent, so that he died immediately.” Meanwhile, Zevanck summoned Andries Jonas, who had not yet killed that night. “Go and call Mayken Cardoes out of her tent and cut her throat,” he told him.

  Cardoes guessed well enough what was happening when Andries arrived outside her quarters. “Mayken,” Jonas said, “are you asleep? Come, we’ll go for a walk.” It was not a request but an order, and the girl had little choice but to obey. She emerged hesitantly from her tent. “Andries,” she begged him, “will you do me evil?” “No, not at all,” he said, but they had only walked a little way along the shore when he seized her without warning and forced her backward onto the coral. Fumbling for his knife, Jonas crouched over her; he reached down and tried to cut her throat, but she was struggling so violently beneath him that he could not manage it. After a few seconds he abandoned the attempt and instead leaned back, pinning her down with one hand while he tried to stab her with the knife held in the other. Desperately, Cardoes thrust out an arm and tried to seize the blade as it descended. She caught the tip of it, but the knife was traveling with such force that the blade sliced straight through the palm and emerged from the back of her hand, wedging itself firmly between the bones.

  Jonas tugged hard at the haft, but the knife was stuck fast and he could not remove it. He could feel the unfortunate girl still thrashing about beneath him, attempting to free herself with her one good hand, so he let go of the knife and tried to strangle her instead. Even then he could not subdue her, but the sound of their struggles had alerted Wouter Loos, and he ran to Jonas’s aid. Exhausted, wounded, and pinned against the coral, Cardoes had no chance against two soldiers. Loos stoved her skull in with an axe and they hurled the corpse into the pit that had been dug for the bodies of the minister’s family. It was little more than a day since they had murdered the girl’s child.

  Still David Zevanck had not had enough. Back in the mutineers’ camp he summoned Allert Janssen, who like Jonas had taken no part in the killing of the predikant’s family, and ordered him to kill the under-barber, Aris Jansz of Hoorn. Like Andries Jonas, Janssen employed a pretext to get the surgeon out of his tent and away from the camp, saying, “Aris, come outside, we have to go and catch four small birds for the merchant.” It was by now well after dark, and Jansz can hardly have believed that this was true, but like Mayken Cardoes he was too scared to refuse. The barber-surgeon and his murderer walked down to the beach, Aris slightly ahead of Allert, and just as they reached it Janssen drew his sword and stuck his victim a sudden blow across the shoulder. At this signal a second mutineer, Cornelis Pietersz, loomed out of the darkness; he had been hiding close by, and now joined in the attack, swinging at Jansz’s head. Remarkably, both men’s swords were so blunt that the surgeon was hardly wounded by their blows. Instead of falling to the ground as they had expected, Jansz took to his heels and vanished into the night, splashing away into the shallows to the east of the island. Janssen and Pietersz went after him, calling one to the other as they searched and no doubt cursing their luck, but their victim had the sense to drop down and let the water hide him, and they could not find him in the darkness. After a few minutes’ fruitless wading to and fro, the two mutineers managed to persuade themselves that Jansz had been critically wounded and was sure to die. “So they said to one another, turning back, ‘Hij heves al wel’ ”—“He’s had it”—and set off together, dripping, to report to Zevanck.

  Bleeding somewhat, but otherwise not badly hurt, Aris kept himself hidden until he was quite certain that the mutineers were gone. Then, slowly and with great care, he worked his way around the island to the beach where Cornelisz’s men kept their skiffs. The boats were poorly guarded—probably Zevanck and the others had not imagined that someone might come at them out of the sea rather than along the island paths—and no one saw him as he untethered a little homemade raft and dragged it silently into the water. When he was well clear of the island, Aris clambered aboard, and began to pull for Hayes’s Island to the north.

  Thus, by the end of the third week of July, the situation in the Abrolhos was relatively clear. Jeronimus and his gang of mutineers had secured absolute control over Batavia’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, their base, the island itself, was so devoid of natural resources that their position in the longer term was not absolutely assured. They remained dependent on the rain for water and on salvaged, and thus limited, supplied for everything else, from clothing to weaponry.

  Meanwhile, Wiebbe Hayes and his original party of 20 men had somehow contrived to survive on the two larges
t islands in the archipelago. There had been no direct contact between the under-merchant and the soldiers for more than a month, but thanks to the arrival of the survivors from Seals’ Island, and then Aris Jansz, Hayes had a very good idea what the mutineers were doing and understood the danger he was in. Jeronimus, on the other hand, had no real inkling of the soldiers’ situation. He realized they had been forewarned and reinforced by several refugees, but neither he nor his council knew whether Hayes’s men were comfortably established on their island, or so short of food and water they were simply dying by degrees.

  The under-merchant knew, however, that the situation had changed in one critical respect. Wiebbe might have no swords or guns, but now he did possess two boats. Cornelis Jansz’s little homemade boat and Aris Jansz’s skiff were not a danger in themselves; they could never carry enough men for Hayes to launch a worthwhile attack. But they could make things very difficult for the mutineers if Pelsaert reached his destination and returned to rescue them.

  6

  Longboat

  “We expected nothing else but death.”

  ANONYMOUS SAILOR

  THE BATAVIA’S LONGBOAT, with Francisco Pelsaert and Ariaen Jacobsz aboard, bobbed in the ocean swells north of the Abrolhos, steering for the South-Land. She was quite a substantial craft—a little more than 30 feet long, with 10 oars and a single mast—but though her sides had been built up with some extra planking there was still not much more than two feet between them and the ocean’s surface. The boat could easily be swamped in heavy seas, and even the short voyage to the mainland over the horizon—which the skipper guessed was only 50 miles away—was not without its dangers.

  Pelsaert’s original intention had been to search for water on the nearest stretch of coastline and bring back enough, in barrels, to supply the rest of the survivors for several weeks at least. This, in turn, would make it possible to send a boat north to fetch help. The chief problem with the plan was that the coast of Terra Australis was so poorly mapped that neither the skipper nor the commandeur had any real idea where to search; the VOC’s earlier encounters with the South-Land indicated that a river reached the coast about 360 miles north of their position, but locating supplies any closer than that would require luck as much as judgment, and there was no telling how long it would take to get them back to the Abrolhos.